My Husband Demanded I Take His Name. 20 Years Later, I Made A Move To Reclaim Myself.

In March, I took part in an artist residency at Vermont Studio Center. The residency is in a small town nestled in the Green Mountains, and it’s designed to give artists time to focus on their work with minimal outside distractions.

Each evening after dinner, I intended to return to my studio to write for a few more hours before bed. Instead, I found myself perched on the edge of one of the couches surrounding the communal television, binge-watching “Love Is Blind” with my fellow cohorts. Hate-watching the Netflix show — in which men and women compete to get engaged and potentially married — was a way to loosen up after a long day of writing about heavy topics.

Even with the show’s default heteronormativity, I was shocked to see that so few women across the multiple seasons of “Love Is Blind” questioned whether they would change their last names after marriage. I lost count of how many times a contestant squealed, “I can’t wait to be Mrs. So-and-So!”

Before seeing this, I had assumed that the tradition of a woman giving up her last name upon marriage was less common among millennials and Gen Zers. But according to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, 79% of women in opposite-sex marriages take the surname of their spouse.

Obviously, this tradition isn’t new to me. I grew up in the 1980s in a conservative, religious household with rigid views on gender, sexuality and women’s roles. In this environment, a woman was meant to be subservient to her husband, and part of that meant taking her husband’s last name to demonstrate that she no longer belonged to her father, but to another man.

Many women who were not raised in traditional, religious homes still opt to change their names after marriage, even though a number of